United Torah Judaism Party leader Moshe Gafni has tabled a bill to lower the Knesset’s current electoral threshold from 3.25 percent to just 2 percent, a move that would allow his Ashkenazi Haredi party to establish itself in to split into two parts.
A lower electoral threshold would also allow other smaller parties to enter the Knesset. Currently, the 3.25% threshold means that a party must win at least four seats to make it into the Knesset; Parties below the limit get their votes redistributed proportionally to other parties. The new bill would lower the threshold, likely to two seats.
The bill, tabled late last week, may indicate a power struggle within the UTJ. The seven-seat faction is actually an alliance of two Ashkenazi Haredi parties, Degel HaTorah and Agudat Yisrael. Degel HaTorah – Gafni’s faction – represents non-Hasidic Haredim. In recent years, Degel HaTorah has grown in influence compared to Agudat Yisrael, who represents Hasidic communities.
Gafni’s threshold-lowering bill is co-signed by the other three Degel HaTorah members on the UTJ’s Knesset List.
Agudat Yisrael historically held the party’s majority in the Knesset until Degel HaTorah’s outsized showing in the 2018 local elections forced a rebalancing of power. Today, the two parties share representation in the Knesset. UTJ’s leadership also switched from Agudat Yisrael’s now-retired MK Yaakov Litzman to Gafni last year, after 18 years with Litzman at the helm.
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A lower electoral threshold would allow parties to run as separate lists.
UTJ MK Yaakov Litzman speaks during a meeting of the United Torah Judaism faction December 13, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“He thinks he’ll have more votes” if Degel HaTorah ran alone and not as part of the UTJ alliance, Haredi political analyst and adviser Avi Grinzweig said of Gafni.
With the possibility of elections in the troubled Knesset drawing ever closer, a divided UTJ is not the only faction threatened by the current electoral threshold. Several coalition parties – including Meretz, Ra’am, Yisrael Beytenu, New Hope and Yamina – get around 4-5 seats in polls.
With several coalition parties potentially threatened by the four-seat hurdle, some Hebrew media reported that Foreign Minister Yair Lapid backed Gafni’s bid to lower the threshold.
A Lapid spokesman declined to comment, saying that “the issue is not currently on the agenda”.
The electoral threshold is a much-discussed topic in Israeli politics. A lower threshold allows more votes to be counted and broader representation of the electorate, but can lead to a situation where small parties with only a few members can over-demand to complete a coalition. A higher threshold limits this and consolidates power, but ultimately results in wasting a certain percentage of each election’s vote count.
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